what Is an APM Agent?
An APM (Application Performance Monitoring) agent is a piece of software that runs alongside your application to monitor its performance. It collects telemetry data like response times, error rates, transaction traces, and resource usage, then sends that data to an APM platform for analysis.
What Does an APM Agent Do?
An APM agent typically:
- Instruments your application’s code to collect metrics.
- Traces individual requests or transactions across systems.
- Captures exceptions and performance anomalies.
- Monitors infrastructure metrics such as CPU and memory.
- Sends collected data to an APM backend/dashboard for analysis.
Examples of APM Agents
| APM Tool | Supported Languages |
|---|---|
| New Relic | Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Ruby, PHP |
| Data dog APM | Java, Go, Python, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Node.js |
| Elastic APM | Java, Python, .NET, Go, Node.js, Ruby |
| AppDynamics | Java, .NET, Node.js, Python |
| Dynatrace One Agent | Auto-detects many environments and languages |
Common Use Cases
- Identifying performance bottlenecks in code or infrastructure
- Tracing slow or failed transactions end-to-end
- Monitoring database query performance
- Measuring the impact of third-party services
- Alerting on anomalies or degraded performance